Wednesday, October 5

Prognosis

I own a kitten. He's a pretty good kitten, all things considered. But last night he was a little keyed up, and he slammed into the wall plug in my office, unplugging the outlet strip my iMac, Brilliant But Erratic, is plugged into. For whatever reason--the New Moon is at the top of my suspects list--this caused all hell to break loose, though the usual power interruptions have never created a problem. I couldn't reboot. After a couple of hours I over-solved the problem with a clean installation of system software, but that didn't quite go as I expected and now I'm trying to figure out how to get all my old stuff back without eight hours of hold music from tech services. In the old days I would have had it finished in twenty minutes. I have a complete backup on external disk, but for some reason it's not being recognized as a boot disk. I'm 51 years old. Time is short. In three or four years every clock in the place will be flashing 12:00, and I'll have dragged my old Mac Classic upstairs so I can play solitaire in black and white.

Since we're catching up, the aforementioned kitten has decided he likes the magnetic letters on the refrigerator. He first pulled down "O" and "K", which I took to mean he likes it here. Then it was "X" and "X" (we have two sets), an obvious plea for some cat porn, but perhaps not the real hardcore stuff. This morning it was "D J". I'm not making this up.

And I need some surgical tubing. It's the padding on those guitar stands we big rock stars use, and mine are drying out after several years, despite my occasional swipes at maintenance. So I went to the guitar store. "Oh, you can get that at that Convalescent Center up on Meridian". So I drive up there and it's out of business. I come home and avail myself of the internets, and the biggest selection I found was at a fishing place. It's used to make lures. So, hoping to support local business, I drove to the bait shop over by the Fairgrounds. This place has been there since the days the Delaware used to hunt the area, and I never see any cars parked there, although admittedly I keep different hours from people who try to outsmart fish. The place is about a block long, and it's lit by a single 40 watt bulb, plus it smells a little funky. Not too bad, but sorta like a small rodent died unobserved there about fifteen years ago. They don't have any, but the woman there was very nice, and offered a couple of suggestions, so I bought a dozen nightcrawlers and set them free. On my compost pile, anyway. I'm a nature lover but I like to get my money's worth.

So, the best lead is Michael's, which is a craft store a few miles away in an alternate universe. I go from earthy forest smells to death by potpourri in the space of ten minutes. And they don't have it either. But say this for Michael's: if you have some free time during business hours it's a great place to meet women. Crafty women.

And, there's some shit going on in the news, and I have opinions about it. Once I get off the phone.

Speaking from my crafty closet (I'm not completely out as a scrapbooker/paper arts/day of the dead shrine maker), you're lucky some crafty femme in the aisles volunteering to wrap your guitar stand in some macrame-beaded-glittered cozy. Hand made, of course, with optional kitten motif.

And aren't kittens the joyous Royal Fools of the universe? My favorite time is when they are young enough to do the sideways four-legged hop. Like fuzzy little potatoes on a spring.